NEAR Foundation, the non-profit that supports the growth and development of the NEAR ecosystem, and Polygon Labs, a software development company for leading Ethereum Layer 2 scaling architecture, announce a strategic collaboration to build zkWASM, a zero-knowledge (ZK) prover for WASM blockchains. With Polygon Labs’ authority in ZK scaling technology and NEAR’s deep WASM runtime expertise, the zkWASM prover is positioned to lead the market among other wasm provers when it launches next year. Both teams shared the announcement at the NEAR ecosystem’s annual flagship conference, NEARCON, in Lisbon.
This announcement brings together two leading protocol teams to build a more secure, interoperable Web3 ecosystem. A zkWASM prover positions NEAR Protocol closer to Ethereum and enables WASM chains to tap into Ethereum liquidity. In the future, through an in-development interoperability layer, chains will also be able to access shared liquidity in a unified ecosystem of CDK-deployed chains, including alternative layer-1s, EVM layer-2s, and WASM chains. Using a zkWASM prover, WASM chains will be able to settle transactions efficiently and cost-effectively with maximum security guarantees, unlocking the full potential of zero-knowledge for the multichain future of Web3.
“We are proud to collaborate with NEAR on this exciting research initiative to further drive the development and adoption of ZK technology. The zkWASM prover maximizes developer customizability, which means projects will be able to select from a number of provers when building with CDK, whether that’s launching or migrating an EVM chain, or building a WASM chain for closer Ethereum alignment and access to liquidity,” said Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon.
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A zkWASM prover will be an upgrade for NEAR validators–instead of the hard work of validating a shard, validators will instead be able to generate a single zero-knowledge proof, greatly simplifying validator requirements. This means better scalability and increased decentralization for the NEAR Protocol.
“We are very excited to work with Polygon Labs to bring all the benefits of zero-knowledge proofs not just to NEAR but all of Web3,” said Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol. “NEAR is integrating more with Ethereum by innovating in new research frontiers, and the shared expertise of NEAR and Polygon will expand the ZK landscape and defragment liquidity across chains. Creating and using the zkWASM prover will also improve the scalability and decentralization of the NEAR L1.”
SOURCE: PRNewswire